Investigation on Challenges in Cloud Security to Provide Effective Cloud Computing Paradigm

Integrated Intelligent Research (IIR) International Journal of Business Intelligents
Volume: 05 Issue: 01 June 2016 Page No.21-24
ISSN: 2278-2400
21
Investigation on Challenges in Cloud Security to
Provide Effective Cloud Computing Paradigm
C.Suresh
Department of Computer Science,Ganadipathy Tulsi’s Jain Engineering College,Vellore, Tamilnadu, India
Email:sureshinbox17@gmail.com
Abstract – Cloud computing provides the capability to use
computing and storage resources on a metered basis and reduce
the investments in an organization’s computing infrastructure.
The spawning and deletion of virtual machines running on
physical hardware and being controlled by hypervisors is a
cost-efficient and flexible computing paradigm. In addition, the
integration and widespread availability of large amounts of
sanitized information such as health care records can be of
tremendous benefit to researchers and practitioners. However,
as with any technology, the full potential of the cloud cannot be
achieved without understanding its capabilities, vulnerabilities,
advantages, and trade-offs. We propose a new method of
achieving the maximum benefit from cloud computation with
minimal risk. Issues such as data ownership, privacy
protections, data mobility, quality of service and service levels,
bandwidth costs, data protection, and support have to be
tackled in order to achieve the maximum benefit from cloud
computation with minimal risk.
Keywords – Cloud security, SAAS, Risk Assessment,
Challenges in Security.
I. INTRODUCTION
The adoption of cloud computing services is growing rapidly,
and one of the reasons is because its architecture stresses the
benefits of shared services over isolated products. This use of
shared services helps an organization focus on its primary
business drivers, and lets information system technology
departments reduce the gap between available computing
capacity (always-on high resource) and required systems
demand (mostly low volume with occasional spikes). This
results in a much more efficient usage-based cost model. Cloud
computing architecture is still evolving, and will continue to
evolve and change for a long time. As we begin to make sense
of the various vendors’ rush to brand everything as “cloud
computing,” it’s important to try to weed out the purely
marketing-related acronyms and concepts. For some time now,
the generally agreed upon classification scheme for cloud
computing has been coined the Software-Platform-
Infrastructure (SPI) model [1]. This acronym represents the
three major services provided through the cloud: SaaS, or
Software as a Service; PaaS, Platform as a Service; and IaaS,
Infrastructure as a Service. Although there are a few other
concepts circulating that suggest variations on this schema
(we’ll address some of these in the section “Alternative
Deployment Models”), the SPI framework [1] for cloud
computing is currently the most widely accepted cloud
computing classification. NIST follows this framework, and
most CSPs (cloud service providers) support this concept.
Although a lot of cloud computing infrastructure is based on
existing technology, there are many differences between the
SPI framework and the traditional IT model. For instance, a
traditional enterprise-wide application rollout requires
resources and coordination from many parts of the
organization. This rollout may require numerous new hardware
(servers, perimeter network devices, workstations, and backup
systems), operating systems, communication link provisioning,
and user and management training, for example. One advantage
of the traditional model is that software applications are more
customizable, but even this advantage often comes at a high
cost in resources and effort. In the traditional IT model,
software applications may require substantial licensing and
support costs. These licensing costs may be based on formulae
that don’t translate well to the actual intended use of the
application, such as hardware requirements (number of servers,
processors, communication links) or other company
characteristics unrelated to the original intent of the application
(total number of employees in the organization, total number of
remote offices, etc.).
Within each of the three delivery models just described are
multiple deployment models. For example, a SaaS delivery
model can be presented to users in one of several deployment
types, such as a private or public cloud. These deployment
models are technically functionally unrelated to each of the
delivery models — that is, any of the delivery models can exist
in any of the deployment scenarios, although a specific
delivery/deployment model pairing may be more common than
others (e.g., SaaS/public). Additionally, based upon the usage
of the cloud by an organization and its relationship to the
enterprise as a whole, these cloud deployment models are often
referred to as external or internal clouds. There are a number of
choices that a client can use to take advantage of the benefits of
cloud computing. These choices comprise the cloud delivery
models SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS of the SPI framework and the
private, community, public, and hybrid cloud deployment
models. The combinations selected and their implementations
are a function of the types of applications involved, storage
needs, time criticality, scaling requirements, and the economics
of the associated projects. The benefits of using cloud
computing are varied. They include a cloud’s inherent
flexibility and resiliency, the potential for reducing costs,
availability of very large amounts of centralized data storage,
means to rapidly deploy computing resources, and scalability.
Cloud computing can also intrinsically provide for migration
from operating in a capital expenditure environment to an
operational expenditure environment, support disaster recovery
and business continuity, and take advantage of centrally
applied security safeguards.
II. CLOUD COMPUTING SECURITY
FUNDAMENTALS
Security is a principal concern when entrusting an
organization’s critical information to geographically dispersed

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cloud platforms not under the direct control of that
organization. In addition to the conventional IT information
system security procedures, designing security into cloud
software during the software development life cycle can greatly
reduce the cloud attack surface. With cloud computing
providing SaaS, secure software is a critical issue. From the
cloud consumer’s point of view, using SaaS in the cloud
reduces the need for secure software development by the
customer. The requirement for secure software development is
transferred to the cloud provider. However, the user might still
find it necessary to develop custom code for the cloud.
Whoever develops the software, this process requires a strong
commitment to a formal, secure software development life
cycle, including design, testing, and secures deployment, patch
management, and disposal. Yet, in many instances, software
security is treated as an add-on to extant software and not as an
important element of the development process. Developing
secure software is based on applying the secure software design
principles that form the fundamental basis for software
assurance. Software assurance has been given many
definitions, and it is important to understand the concept. The
Software Security Assurance Report defines software assurance
as “the basis for gaining justifiable confidence that software
will consistently exhibit all properties required to ensure that
the software, in operation, will continue to operate dependably
despite the presence of sponsored (intentional) faults. [3] In
practical terms, such software must be able to resist most
attacks, tolerate as many as possible of those attacks it cannot
resist, and contain the damage and recover to a normal level of
operation as soon as possible after any attacks it is unable to
resist or tolerate.”
III. SECURE CLOUD COMPUTING
REQUIREMENTS
The requirements for secure cloud software are concerned with
nonfunctional issues such as minimizing or eliminating
vulnerabilities and ensuring that the software will perform as
required, even under attack. This goal is distinct from security
functionality in software, which addresses areas that derive
from the information security policy, such as identification,
authentication, and authorization. There are many methods for
developing code. Any of them can be used to develop a secure
cloud application. Every development model must have both
requirements and testing. In some models, the requirements
may emerge over time. It is very important that security
requirements are established early in the development process.
Security in a cloud application tends to be subtle and invisible.
Security is prominent at only two times in the development life
cycle: requirements definition and testing. At other times,
deadlines, capabilities, performance, the look and feel, and
dozens of other issues tend to push security to the back. This is
why it is important to ensure that security requirements are
prominent at the beginning of the software development life
cycle.
Cloud software security requirements are a function of policies
such as system security policies, software policies, and
information system policies. Cloud providers also have to
satisfy regulations and directives such as FISMA, Gramm-
Leach-Bliley, Sarbanes-Oxley, and HIPAA [3]. For proper
secure cloud software implementation, these issues have to be
accounted for during the software development life cycle and
through an effective cloud software security policy.
IV. SECURITY CHALLENGES IN CLOUD
COMPUTING
The introduction of cloud services presents many challenges to
an organization. When an organization migrates to consuming
cloud services, and especially public cloud services, much of
the computing system infrastructure will now be under the
control of a third-party Cloud Services Provider (CSP) [4][2].
Many of these challenges can and should be addressed through
management initiatives. These management initiatives will
require clearly delineating the ownership and responsibility
roles of both the CSP (which may or may not be the
organization itself) and the organization functioning in the role
as customer. Security managers must be able to determine what
detective and preventative controls exist to clearly define the
security posture of the organization. Although proper security
controls must be implemented based on asset, threat, and
vulnerability risk assessment matrices, and are contingent upon
the level of data protection needed, some general management
processes will be required regardless of the nature of the
organization’s business.
Security policies are the foundation of a sound security
implementation. Often organizations will implement technical
security solutions without first creating this foundation of
policies, standards, guidelines, and procedures, unintentionally
creating unfocused and ineffective security controls. A policy
is one of those terms that can mean several things. For
example, there are security policies on firewalls, which refer to
the access control and routing list information. Standards,
procedures, and guidelines are also referred to as policies in the
larger sense of a global information security policy.
Although the global adoption of virtualization is a relatively
recent event, threats to the virtualized infrastructure are
evolving just as quickly. Historically, the development and
implementation of new technology has preceded the full
understanding of its inherent security risks, and virtualized
systems are no different. The following sections examine the
threats and vulnerabilities inherent in virtualized systems and
look at some common management solutions to those threats.
These classifications are somewhat ambiguous in the IT
community at large. The most important thing to remember
from a security perspective is that there is a more significant
impact when a host OS with user applications and interfaces is
running outside of a VM at a level lower than the other VMs
(i.e., a Type 2 architecture). Because of its architecture, the
Type 2 environment [5] increases the potential risk of attacks
against the host OS.
V. SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE SECURITY
Cloud computing models of the future will likely combine the
use of SaaS (and other XaaS’s as appropriate), utility
computing, and Web 2.0 collaboration technologies to leverage
the Internet to satisfy their customers’ needs. New business
models being developed as a result of the move to cloud
computing are creating not only new technologies and business
operational processes but also new security requirements and

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challenges as described previously. As the most recent
evolutionary step in the cloud service model, SaaS will likely
remain the dominant cloud service model for the foreseeable
future and the area where the most critical need for security
practices and oversight will reside. Just as with a managed
service provider, corporations or end users will need to
research vendors’ policies on data security before using vendor
services to avoid losing or not being able to access their data.
Determining data security is harder today, so data security
functions have become more critical than they have been in the
past. A tactic not covered by Gartner is to encrypt the data
yourself. If you encrypt the data using a trusted algorithm, then
regardless of the service provider’s security and encryption
policies, the data will only be accessible with the decryption
keys. One of the most important actions for a security team is
to develop a formal charter for the security organization and
program. This will foster a shared vision among the team of
what security leadership is driving toward and expects, and will
also foster “ownership” in the success of the collective team.
The charter should be aligned with the strategic plan of the
organization or company the security team works for.
VI. RISK ASSESSMENT
Security risk assessment is critical to helping the information
security organization make informed decisions when balancing
the dueling priorities of business utility and protection of
assets. Lack of attention to completing formalized risk
assessments can contribute to an increase in information
security audit findings, can jeopardize certification goals, and
can lead to inefficient and ineffective selection of security
controls that may not adequately mitigate information security
risks to an acceptable level. A formal information security risk
management process should proactively assess information
security risks as well as plan and manage them on a periodic or
as-needed basis. More detailed and technical security risk
assessments in the form of threat modeling should also be
applied to applications and infrastructure. Doing so can help
the product management and engineering groups to be more
proactive in designing and testing the security of applications
and systems and to collaborate more closely with the internal
security team. Threat modeling requires IT and business
process knowledge, as well as technical knowledge of how the
applications or systems under review work.As SaaS moves into
cloud computing for the storage and processing of customer
data, there is a higher expectation that the SaaS will effectively
manage the security risks with third parties. Lack of a third-
party risk management program may result in damage to the
provider’s reputation, revenue losses, and legal actions should
the provider be found not to have performed due diligence on
its third-party vendors.
VII. VIRTUAL MACHINE SECURITY
In the cloud environment, physical servers are consolidated to
multiple virtual machine instances on virtualized servers. Not
only can data center security teams replicate typical security
controls for the data center at large to secure the virtual
machines, they can also advise their customers on how to
prepare these machines for migration to a cloud environment
when appropriate. Firewalls, intrusion detection and
prevention, integrity monitoring, and log inspection can all be
deployed as software on virtual machines to increase protection
and maintain compliance integrity of servers and applications
as virtual resources move from on-premises to public cloud
environments. By deploying this traditional line of defense to
the virtual machine itself, you can enable critical applications
and data to be moved to the cloud securely. To facilitate the
centralized management of a server firewall policy, the security
software loaded onto a virtual machine should include a
bidirectional firewall that enables virtual machine isolation and
location awareness, thereby enabling a tightened policy and the
flexibility to move the virtual machine from on-premises to
cloud resources. Integrity monitoring and log inspection
software must be applied at the virtual machine level. This
approach to virtual machine security, which connects the
machine back to the mother ship, has some advantages in that
the security software can be put into a single software agent
that provides for consistent control and management
throughout the cloud while integrating seamlessly back into
existing security infrastructure investments, providing
economies of scale, deployment, and cost savings for both the
service provider and the enterprise.
VIII. NEXT STEP IN CLOUD SECURITY
One of the most important considerations in deciding which
services should be placed on a cloud is cost. Cloud expenses
include charges for storage, processing time, and bandwidth
consumption. Bandwidth costs can be extremely high;
therefore, a cloud application that involves a large amount of
data being exchanged with a cloud over extended periods of
time would not be a good cloud candidate. Also, applications
that have a high degree of parallelism can be run more
efficiently on cloud systems using available distributed
processing frameworks such as Map/Reduce and Hadoop [6].
Another important consideration, especially for companies
involved in e-commerce, is availability and resilience. Critical
applications that can affect an organization’s mission should
not be placed on the cloud, and the cloud provider should
demonstrate that its system exhibits resiliency in the event of
system crashes and unexpected events. Applications should be
designed such that they can be moved from one cloud provider
to another, in order to avoid being locked in to a particular
vendor. In addition, some laws and regulations require that
critical data be kept on the organization’s site and under its
control. Cloud computing can also be used to provide cost-
effective backup services and to handle overflow tasks during
periods of peak activity such as seasonal work.
Google Groups provides the means for individuals and
organizations to setup a Group site devoted to a special interest
or topic. Having done so, group members can communicate
through the Web or e-mail to exchange information on their
subjects of interest. You need to know how much security is
enough, and to do that you need to know the security needs of
your data. Therefore, companies should assess the sensitivity of
the data they are considering moving to the cloud. It’s also very
important to consider the risks and benefits of cloud
computing. This can be done by executing a traditional risk
assessment, while focusing it on the risk/benefit of exploiting
the cloud. Adopting a flexible risk management process can be
a big help, if you don’t do this already. RM is the
identification, analysis, control, and minimization of loss that is

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associated with events [8][[9]. RM’s main function is to
mitigate risk. Mitigating risk means reducing risk until it
reaches a level that is acceptable to an organization. As you
consider security management controls, a cost versus benefit
analysis is a very important process. The need for, or value of,
a particular security control must be weighed against its impact
on resource allocation. A company can have exemplary
security with a seemingly infinite budget, but there is always a
point of diminishing returns, when the security demands
interfere with the primary business. Making the financial case
to upper management for various security controls is a very
important part of a security manager’s function. A trade-off
analysis can be formal or informal, depending upon the
audience and the intent of the analysis. If the audience of the
TOA is higher management or a client, often a formalized
TOA, supported by objective evidence, documentation, and
reports, will be necessary.[7][10] If the TOA will be examined
by internal staff or departments, often it can be less formal; but
the fundamental concepts and principles still apply in either
case.
IX. CONCLUSION
With the adoption of cloud technology comes many challenges
to an organization, especially in the area of secure computing.
Managing the security of the organization’s private cloud as
well as supervising the actions of the Cloud Services Provider
can well become a monumental task. To help lessen the size of
the task, clearly defined management initiatives must be
instituted which delineate clear ownership and responsibility of
the data security. Therefore in this chapter we examined
detective, preventative, and best practice controls to ensure that
virtualization doesn’t break the security posture of the
company. To this end we looked at the need and function of
security policies, and gave some examples of what types of
polices are usually developed. We also touched upon computer
intrusion detection and response and the creation of a
Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT).We
looked first at some specific threats to the virtual environment,
then examined a few general security best practices, and then
ended with details of hardening techniques that are unique to
virtualized systems.
References
[1] Amit Sangroya, Saurabh Kumar, Jaideep Dhok, and
Vasudeva Varma, “Towards Analyzing Data Security
Risks in Cloud Computing Environments”, Springer-
Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010, pp. 255-265.
[2] Bernd Grobauer, Tobias Walloschek, and Elmar Stöcker,
“Understanding Cloud Computing Vulnerabilities”, IEEE,
1540- 7993/11, 2011, pp: 50-57.
[3] H. Takabi, J.B.D. Joshi, and G.-J. Ahn, “SecureCloud:
Towards a Comprehensive Security Framework for Cloud
Computing Environments,” Proc. 1st IEEE Int’l Workshop
Emerging Applications for Cloud Computing (CloudApp
2010), IEEE CS Press, 2010, pp. 393– 398.
[4] Hassan Takabi and James B.D. Joshi, University of
Pittsburgh, Gail – Joon and Ahn Arizona State University,
“Security and Privacy Challenges in Cloud Computing
Environments”, IEEE security and privacy,
www.computer.org/security, 2010, pp. 24 – 31.
[5] Krishnan Subramanian, “Private, Public and Hybrid
Clouds”, whitepaper: Trend Micro, 2011.
[6] Hsin-Yi Tsai, Melanie Siebenhaar and André Miede, Yu-
Lun Huang, Ralf Steinmetz, “Threat as a Service?
Virtualization’s impact on Cloud Security”, IEEE, IT Pro,
2012, pp: 32- 37.
[7] Rafael Moreno-Vozmediano, Rubén S. Montero, and
Ignacio M. Llorente, “Key Challenges in Cloud
Computing to Enable the Future Internet of Services”,
IEEE, Digital Object Indentifier 10.1109/MIC.2012.69.
[8] Jianyong Chen, Yang Wang, Xiaomin Wang, “On demand
Security Architecture for Cloud Computing”, IEEE, 0018-
9162, Digital Object Indentifier 10.1109/MC.2012.120,
pp: 1 -12.
[9] Bhaskar Prasad Rimal, Eunmi Choi, Ian Lumb, “A
Taxonomy and Survey of Cloud Computing Systems”,
978-0-7695-3769-6/09, IEEE, pp: 44 – 51.
[10]John Viega, “Cloud Computing and the Common Man”,
IEEE, 0018- 9162/09, pp: 106 – 108.
Suresh C was born in Vellore, India, in
1990. He received the B.E. degree in
computer science and engineering from
Kings Engineering College, Chennai. He
currently pursuing M.E degree in
computer science and engineering from
Ganadipathy Tulsi’s Jain Engineering College, Vellore. His
current research interests include cloud computing, enterprise
application, big data and software engineering.

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Investigation on Challenges in Cloud Security to Provide Effective Cloud Computing Paradigm